In "Brief Encounters: Conversations, Magic Moments, and Assorted Hijinks," a welcome sequel to 2010's "Talk Show," Dick Cavett covers a lot of ground in a collection of erudite and witty pieces: from writing jokes for the comedy-impaired Art Linkletter to...

Joey Luft remembers it well: appearing on the 1963 Christmas episode of his mother Judy Garland's CBS musical-variety series with his two older sisters, Lorna Luft and Liza Minnelli.
On a recent afternoon, Luft was rewatching the show, his eyes wide and...

Just as we long suspected, the only thing that could stop Joan Rivers was death.
Abrasive, raunchy, self-immolating and often unapologetically offensive, Rivers changed comedy, courted controversy, survived catastrophe and refused to give up or give in,...

I hope those who know Joan Rivers only from her work the last couple of decades on shows like “Fashion Police” will take the time to read some of the appreciations that talk about who she used to be.
Rivers, who died Thursday at age 81 after...

Joan Rivers understood the importance of branding long before it was a showbiz buzzword.
Her career outlasted so many of her contemporaries, male and female, from the 1960s nightclub arena, because she was adept at marketing herself and reinventing her signature material to stay relevant for the times. Indeed, Rivers worked steadily until just a few days before her death on Sept. 4 after suffering a cardiac arrest the week before while undergoing vocal chord surgery -- in addition to her work on E's...

Michael Baigent
Historical mysteries author sued publisher of 'Da Vinci Code'
Michael Baigent, 65, a writer who gained attention for launching a lawsuit contending that "The Da Vinci Code" stole ideas from his book, died of a brain hemorrhage June 17 in Brighton, England, his family said.
Baigent is best known for writing the 1982 nonfiction book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," which explores theories that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, the couple had a child and the bloodline survives. In...

Margaret Pellegrini, one of the last of the 124 little people who played Munchkins in the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz," died Wednesday at her Glendale, Ariz., home. She was 89.
The 4-foot-tall Pellegrini, a frequent guest of honor at "Oz" festivals around the U.S., had been in declining health since a stroke in March, said Colleen Zimmer, an organizer of the annual Oz-Stravaganza festival in Chittenango, N.Y., birthplace of "Oz" author L. Frank Baum.
Illness kept Pellegrini from serving as grand...

Frank Tripucka
Broncos quarterback in first AFL season
Frank Tripucka, 85, who quarterbacked the Denver Broncos in their inaugural AFL season and later allowed his No. 18 to be unretired so Peyton Manning could wear it, died Thursday in Woodland Park, N.J., the Broncos announced. His family said he had congestive heart failure.
A former standout at Notre Dame, Tripucka played for the Detroit Lions, Chicago Cardinals and Dallas Texans in the NFL and for Saskatchewan and Ottawa in Canada. He was...

Sunday night's Emmy Awards featured the standard "In Memoriam" segment, in which the faces and clips of the recently deceased played to varying levels of applause. But this year, they made a decision to single out five people to receive special tributes, delivered — sometimes tearfully — by former costars.
One of the most curious decisions made for these tributes was that no actual clips were used to demonstrate said person's exceptional mastery of the craft. Instead, we got secondhand...

NBC ramped up its fight to gain a younger late-night audience by confirming Wednesday that Jimmy Fallon will take over as host of "The Tonight Show" in 2014.
Ending weeks of gossip, NBC made the announcement that current host Jay Leno would end his hosting tenure next spring. Though Leno still is the most-watched late-night TV host, his hold on the coveted 18-49 bracket is tenuous. ABC this year moved its late-night show "Jimmy Kimmel Live" from after 11:35 p.m. to 10:35 p.m. as his direct competition,...